I'm self taught on Photoshop, which has meant that I can do quite a bit, but there's probably plenty I'm doing wrong, or taking the very long way to say the least. Anyway, looking forward to what I can learn from this thread.

Click to expand...

Same here. After years of using Paint Shop Pro for web graphics and other projects, I taught myself how to use Photoshop in order to create some DVD cover art for some Star Wars DVDs I was making. I ended up taking a college course on Photoshop two summers ago in film school, and while I did learn a lot of techniques I never new about, I'd say at least half the course covered things I already knew.

From Grimby's original link, I found this [link=http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/lightning/lightning.htm]creating lightning tutorial[/link] which, next to learning how to make a proper light saber, is the greatest thing ever. Now I just need a reason to have someone go Palpatine on someone else.

Edit:
This [link=http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/planet/planet.htm]Planet creating[/link] one looks pretty cool as well.

How is anyone feeling about CS4. So far I've tried PS and Flash out, not a huge fan of the changes. Maybe I just like old things. It just seemed like they added a lot of fancy unnecessary things, messing up the layout and whatnot. Haven't gotten too far into it yet though.

I'm just starting my foray into CS4. I like the interface, but I agree that for all intents and purposes it's just a pretty version of PS 7 or CS1. For me the 3rd party filters still do the heavy lifting.

I like the idea of it, but I think it could be accomplished in a slightly more realistic way. Granted I haven't tried yet, but the insides are blatantly filter driven which means you're going to end up with an image that looks half-fake and that's just....irksome. At least to me. Hmm...ponder this I will.

Yep, I've done both of them and it all comes down to the inner light and it looking realistic. From my testing that requires working with the blending options and getting the right mix of colors and effects.

Okay, this is a repeat of a tutorial I posted on facebook. Basically it's how to make your own paper using just brushes and some knowledge of the interplay between lines and how to make it 'authentic' looking. This is also the easiest of anything I can teach anyone how to do. I'll post more complex tutorials later.

First you need to pick a color. Now, you could pick pure white for this, but I don't recommend it as the paper I'm creating is meant to be dirty and old. So I usually pick a tan color for my background. For this shade go with #f4efdb. It seems to work best, but really any light flesh color will do.

[image=http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/189/paper1b.jpg]

Side note: I never used to be this way, but David kind of drilled organization of layers into my psyche. And it works, because I used to get so confused by all of the layers that I'd get lost. Now...not so much. So your organization should look something like this:

[image=http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/7728/picture2el.png]

Before using your brushes I recommend turning down the flow and opacity to somewhere in the 40's. The purpose of this is so your brushes don't show up too much.

Now the real fun begins. Place your textures anywhere on the paper you want. Your eyes usually tell you where a brush would make sense and if not, then the way your brushes are formed should tell you anyway. Also, for each bit of paper you create you should make a new layer for each of them. This gives you the ability to do what needs to be done later in this tutorial.

It helps to have a stock of paper brushes. And if you want help on how to make brushes out of an image let me know. Or I can just email my set to you.

Once you figure out the placement of your brushes then it starts to take shape:

[image=http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/8094/paper2.jpg]

[image=http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6382/paper3.jpg]

[image=http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/2543/paper4.jpg]

Okay, the rough edges are still showing in this paper. So, what you need to do is to learn how layer masks work. I'll explain it in-depth if any of you are really interested in continuing further. But basically what a layer mask does is erase parts of the image without ever getting rid of them. How you use a mask is to use one of the circular brushes and keep the hardness on 0 as you're working. Always remember that black erases and white replaces. What I mean is that you're using black to mask the parts of the image you don't want. And white reveals them.

This is the most important step in brush creation. You see, your channels separates the colors of your image into red, green, and blue. What you want to do here is pick the channel that shows the most contrast. Usually it's green, but sometimes it's red or blue. For this image I chose red because it showed the most contrast to me.

You select all for me it was command+A but in Windows it'd be ctrl+A, I believe. Or you can just go up to 'edit' and do it the manual way. You copy it using command+C or ctrl+C. Then go back to your layers panel and paste it using command+V or ctrl+V.

You can either select everything in the image and use that. Or you can use your rectangular selection tool and take out slices. I will caution you, though, that brushes have a maximum size of 2500 pixels. So if your image exceeds that you may need to go up to image>image size and lower the pixel count to at least 2500.

I also don't recommend using this exact image as the original is 300dpi and the brushes you can create should be higher resolution than 72dpi.

For me I usually use deviantart for my stock or I go here to the stockxchng ([link=http://www.sxc.hu]linky[/link]). So have fun. If this was a bit confusing, again, let me know.

True enough, I just got photoshop last week, but adobe softwares are fairly similar. Thing that threw me off was masking around the foreground. In AE that makes anything outside the mask transparent. In photoshop, it fills in the mask with a black solid if you try to do the mask directly on the image.